What’s so great about that? Ars editors pick the most overrated games

There are no sacred cows on this list of popular games we just don't get.

Everybody has at least one: a game that, for one reason or another, just never appealed to you despite its presence on the "best games of all time" list for many people. A game that you're almost ashamed to admit to hating in polite company, for fear that you'll be branded a gauche iconoclast (or, worse, an ignorant troll). A game that makes you question not just your tastes, but the concept of popular taste as a whole. I mean, what do people see in that game? This is an anthology of those games for some of Ars' editors.

We go into this list knowing that our picks are going to be baffling to some of you, and that we're in the extreme minority with most of these picks. That's kind of the point. Before you accuse us of just trying to "stir the pot" with intentionally subversive picks, know that the author of each of these blurbs truly and honestly just doesn't like the game being discussed. Also know that, no matter how popular a game or series is among the general public, we fully believe that every game has its flaws, and that there is no title that can (or should) be universally loved by literally everybody.

With that, let the slaughtering of the sacred cows begin!

Dragon's Lair

by Kyle Orland

I was too young to catch the whole Dragon's Lair craze in the '80s, but I distinctly remember the first time I saw the game sitting alone in a movie theater lobby sometime in the early '90s. My reaction can be divided into three distinct stages.

Stage 1 (After seeing the game's "attract mode" animation from across the lobby): Holy crap? What is... how do they get graphics like that? Is there a VCR under there? The whole game doesn't really look like that, does it? No... it can't. Can it?

Stage 2 (After putting in a dollar—A WHOLE DOLLAR—to try it out): Oh my god, the game does actually look like that! I'm actually going to get to control a real cartoon! This is so awesome!

Stage 3 (After making a total of one correct move before dying three times in succession): What the hell was that? That sucked!

Dragon's Lair seems to keep getting ported to new platforms in the decades since I first saw it had that arcade experience (most recently winning a coveted Steam Greenlight spot), so there must be some market of nostalgia-filled gamers whose opinions of the game probably gelled during Stage 1 and 2 above. And while I can appreciate the artistry of the animation, which still holds up today, I find the see-a-flash-and-hit-a-corresponding-button gameplay just truly, utterly, stupefyingly bad.

This isn't just sour grapes after one tough arcade play either... I spent a good deal of time struggling with a CD-ROM version years later just so I could see more of those wonderful, fluid, moving drawings. It didn't change my opinion one bit. As a short film (or even a choose-your-own adventure "interactive" movie), Dragon's Lair would be amazing. As a game, it's awful.

Gears of War

by Sean Gallagher

For Christmas in 2006, there were two things on my wish list: An Xbox 360 and Gears of War. I wasn't disappointed on Christmas morning—the disappointment wouldn't arrive until some time around New Year's.

There were some innovative things about Gears of War's combat engine (shoot from cover! OMG!), and it held up well in multiplayer. But the single-player campaign came nowhere near living up to the wave of hype that Gears of War rode in on. The plot was plodding and monotonous. The AI for "squad members" and the list of commands available to direct them made them more of a liability than an asset most of the time. And then there were the absurd mechanics of that chainsaw assault rifle.

Unfortunately, after the Xbox 360 etched a scratch into my first copy of the game, I actually had to buy a second before I figured out it probably wasn't even worth paying for once.

Halo

by Lee Hutchinson

Halo, how I dislike thee. A first-person shooter with few redeeming qualities, it's the kind of game that would have been released into obscurity had it not been a launch title for the original Xbox. The game sported mediocre graphics, a cliche-filled and unoriginal single-player campaign, and a tired and uninspiring set of multiplayer options. In spite of these detriments, its position as the only multiplayer first-person shooter available to Xbox users guaranteed its success. Apparently when you're dying of thirst in the desert, any drink will do, even if it's your own pee.

Halo's success is particularly cringe-worthy considering how ridiculously inferior it was to first-person shooters available on PC. Its contemporaries include classic AAA titles like Aliens vs. Predator 2, Ghost Recon, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, all of which were vastly superior to Halo in every way but one: they weren't available to Xbox users clamoring for a way to frag their buddies.

The game spawned a plethora of (much better, actually fun) sequels and has legions of fans, but the first game in the series was just plain bad.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

by Andrew Cunningham

I think it was Twilight Princess that ultimately prompted me to give up on modern Zelda games. From the outset, there was something about it that felt perfunctory. It was obviously trying very hard to build a deeper, story-driven game on top of Ocarina of Time's sturdy foundation. And while there were certainly moments of greatness strewn amidst TP's bloated, 30-something-hour running time, in the end it just felt like Zelda-by-the-numbers. Get your sword. Go to the dungeon. Find item (dah dah dah daaaaaah!). Beat dungeon and boss with item. Explore around until you finally find the next dungeon. Repeat.

Twilight Princess was really just the culmination of a long-running trend. Both Zelda and Mario, two of Nintendo's biggest flagships, are respectful of their roots to the point that they sometimes feel fenced in by their conventions. But Mario has taken what made the original games so fun—precision platforming, great level design, and pick-up-and-play gameplay—and pushed it to the fore. Newer games have even forgone the tiresome, empty hub worlds of Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy in favor of a format that puts as little time between turning on the console and playing a level as possible.

Zelda, on the other hand, has taken the best elements from the NES and SNES entries—puzzle solving, exploration, and swordplay, in roughly that order—and weighed them down with over-long tutorials, interminable cutscenes, and fetch quests that pad the games' running time without really adding much to the fun. Twilight Princess added insult to injury by replacing the precise button controls with gratuitous controller waggling (in the Wii version), making it by far my least favorite entry in the series (though, to be fair, I haven't even given Skyward Sword a chance after Twilight Princess scared me off the series).

366 Reader Comments

You should have stated this at the beginning of your wall of text because this fact makes your opinion completely irrelevant. Good lord, hated Doom? Please stop identifying yourself as a gamer right now.

As Pit Spawn said, Diablo 3 should have been on the list. I also think Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO should have been. The premise of the article was overrated games.... I know of no other massively overrated games then those two. Seriously, D3 sold close to 7 million copies in the first two or so weeks at $60 a pop. How many are still playing compared to those numbers? SWTOR was equally overrated and is about to enter free 2 play. Even RIFT is still a subscription based game and doing better then SWTOR.

I saw someone mention GW2. Not sure on this one myself. Having played it to max level and max gear level I am torn. The core of the game seems to be on PVP/WvW more than anything. While the game world is expansive as hell and it takes a long time to explore the world, I personally hate the in-game level scaling mechanic. I understand the reasoning, but I don't like it anyway. Was it overrated? I don't think so. It was focused on previous players and they seem to be satisfied for the most part.

What a horrible article. This list was certainly compiled from inexperienced gamers. As others have mentioned the list is too short, excluding the fact that some games on the list are popular for reasons that they do not and will not understand. Ars shouldn't be reviewing any video game as almost all of the articles are completely biased. Pokface would throw down a gauntlet? Laughable.

Spore anyone? The game that promised to encompass the whole of evolution plus the conquering of the galaxy to boot, yet ended up too thin an experience for anyone who had actually enjoyed Maxis in the past.

Spore would make a list of overly hyped games that fell flat.

I don't think there was any discussion of it being great (or even good...) once it was actually released, so it doesn't really fit this category.

There aren't many actual people that liked it, but the gaming press was crazy about it (to the tune of an 84 on Metacritic.) 'Overrated' is fair, but its hype died too quickly and it wasn't truly bad enough to deserve 'most overrated'.

It's like console gamers thought it was a revolution, but that's only because they weren't gaming on their PC's. At least with Halo, you KNEW that was the case. With Goldeneye, gamers everywhere were so ignorant.

It's like console gamers thought it was a revolution, but that's only because they weren't gaming on their PC's. At least with Halo, you KNEW that was the case. With Goldeneye, gamers everywhere were so ignorant.

In my opinion what saves Goldeneye is how ridiculous the multiplayer experience always ended up. The hilarious deaths, the silly character choices, the terrible level design. Add in the fact that it was one of the only 4 player shooters at the time. It all combined to make me feel like I was playing some kind of weird parody. I cannot recall any critical acclaim for Goldeneye, it seemed to me that the game enjoyed a cult following because of the multiplayer comedy.

Halo seemed to take itself too seriously (with the encouragement of some over-enthusiastic zelots) however, and that's why I think it makes this "overhyped" list over Goldeneye.

What a horrible article. This list was certainly compiled from inexperienced gamers. As others have mentioned the list is too short, excluding the fact that some games on the list are popular for reasons that they do not and will not understand. Ars shouldn't be reviewing any video game as almost all of the articles are completely biased. Pokface would throw down a gauntlet? Laughable.

Cut them some slack.I'm not a "gamer" and many of us geeks are not "gamers" - Ars does not need to become yet another gamer site regurgitating the same things all the other dedicated gamer sites do.

If you played Dragon's Lair for the first time in the 1990's when raster graphics were much MUCH better than they were in 1982, the videodisc graphics weren't as impressive. Sure, an animated game looked a lot different, but it's not going to be the breathtakingly beautiful experience that we older folks got in early 80's, so much so that one didn't mind losing a week's worth of quarters to get three moves further*.

* - Also remember the whole arcade "cred" thing, where it was geek-cool to be the guy who could get to the end of Dragon's Lair on a single game.

Halo's success is particularly cringe-worthy considering how ridiculously inferior it was to first person shooters available on PC. Its contemporaries include classic AAA titles like Aliens vs. Predator 2, Ghost Recon, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, all of which were vastly superior to Halo in every way but one: they weren't available to Xbox users clamoring for a way to frag their buddies.

The game spawned a plethora of (much better, actually fun) sequels and has legions of fans, but the first game in the series was just plain bad.

I can feel the heat of the flaming as I post this, and imagine masses of angry, poor-taste-in-shooter Xbox-lovers everywhere running toward me, wielding cartoon armor, floating when they jump and moving at a snail's pace as they attempt to turn 90 degrees in the same fashion as found in Halo.....

I AGREE, I AGREE, OH, HOW I AGREE!!.... except that I think the entire Halo series belongs in this post.

I understand why people [who have never played a PC shooter, much less Battlefield/COD games] are Halo fans; it's an interesting title.

Spore anyone? The game that promised to encompass the whole of evolution plus the conquering of the galaxy to boot, yet ended up too thin an experience for anyone who had actually enjoyed Maxis in the past.

Spore would make a list of overly hyped games that fell flat.

I don't think there was any discussion of it being great (or even good...) once it was actually released, so it doesn't really fit this category.

There aren't many actual people that liked it, but the gaming press was crazy about it (to the tune of an 84 on Metacritic.) 'Overrated' is fair, but its hype died too quickly and it wasn't truly bad enough to deserve 'most overrated'.

Good Point. is the list based on reviews or public opinion? The are plenty of games that had strong "reviews" from various sources, but that most people agree are not that good. On the other hand, I got the impression that this list was more about games that have a fan base, but that are overrated.

Dragons Lair:I pretty much agree. The game was pretty to look at, but had no gameplay

Gears of War:I admit, I found that game way over-rated myself. I just couldn't get into it.

Halo:The comments on this one just felt dishonest. That just read like a rant about the superiority of PC gaming, and didn't really even touch the subject of Halo. Mediocre graphics? Not compared to anything else on console at it's generation. Hell, if you don't have an HD TV, the graphics still hold up relatively well today. What the hell kind of standard do you have? Cliche story? Show me. Show me one FPS that isn't some sort of cliche story. Hell, as far as story lines go, it defintely has one of the better ones for an FPS.

Super Meat Boy:Eh. That sounded a great deal more like criticism of the genre than the game. It was obvious by your statement that brutally difficult platformers aren't your cup of tea. The reward of the game is nothing more than bragging rights. If you need more than that out of a game, you're barking up the wrong tree. On the flip side, I'll definitely agree about it being frustrating

I agree with a lot of the picks, and Kyle's reaction to Dragon's Lair mirrored mine exactly. As I kept reading, I was really hoping to see Minecraft make the list.

I've tried and tried, but I just don't get the appeal. I'd rather get out a box of Legos or take a nap. Minecraft is inferior to the former and about equal to the latter.

Am I the only one that just doesn't get it?

I don't get it either with Minecraft... I tried getting into it, but I found to diffuse as you had to have x and y items in order to get s item. Was frustrating and confused I quit playing it, although I totally loved the soundtrack best part of the game, Imo...

I would add Resident Evil 4 to this list. It's very highly rated, but I never saw what the allure was. You go into an area, learn the spawn points, and repeat a combo to kill the zombies without wasting ammo. Rinse, repeat, endlessly. I tried 3 times over the span of two years to get into this game, but just couldn't.

To be fair, I played it on the Wii, which may have contributed to my distaste for the game.

The original Far Cry. A tech demo masked as a power fantasy. Everyone kept going on about how much liberty the game gives you, you can sneak or shoot, blah blah blah. I just didn't see it. Whether you chose to be stealthy or aggressive, made absolutely no difference in the game, and beyond that, it was a run-of-the-mill shooter with -admittedly- pretty graphics.

Are we going to see the reversal of this article as well, i.e. the most underrated games?

If you played Dragon's Lair for the first time in the 1990's when raster graphics were much MUCH better than they were in 1982, the videodisc graphics weren't as impressive. Sure, an animated game looked a lot different, but it's not going to be the breathtakingly beautiful experience that we older folks got in early 80's, so much so that one didn't mind losing a week's worth of quarters to get three moves further*.

Dragon's Lair sucks as a game, but when I saw it for the first time I couldn't believe my eyes. It looked like magic.

This is a rare misstep for Ars articles; it's completely pointless with virtually no objective analysis. It's not a list of overrated games it's a list of popular games the Ars writers 'don't get'. Something I'd expect to see on IGN not Ars. Everyone has a list like that; for me it's all the GTA games, they just don't do it for me. But I understand why they are critically acclaimed and why people love them, even if I don't. Just as I know I shouldn't deride a game whilst failing to recognise when and under what conditions it was released. A far more interesting article would have been genuinely overrated games - critically acclaimed but ultimately fail objective reviewing, which is actually hard to do.

I'll second that. Skyrim is the worst game to ever receive positive press, let alone game of the year. I've spent enough hours playing it to know that bugs from the previous Elder Scrolls titles are still there, and the addition of dragons does not "instant classic" make. I started to realize something was wrong when the massive dragon "terrorizing the countryside!" died at the mere suggestion of my crappy arrows. 90's style jousting melee combat? Check. Overly cumbersome inventory management? Check. Crafting of questionable value? Check. All of the above mechanics carried over from the last game with little to no improvement? Four words: Game. Of. The. Year.

I can solve the reason why this list includes Halo and Gears of War as "overrated"... These people played alone.

Seriously, as a FPS geek in the 2000's, Halo was awesome for a single reason, I could get 3 other people in the room with me *in my family* to sit through a FPS with me COOP through a game. THAT is why Halo is important and not overrated. There were other shooters that did the things halo did sooner, and better, but none of them would be touched by people I knew. And, my memory is fuzzy for the time, but Halo felt like the first FPS to encourage coop and build around the idea of coop. This is important.

Most shooters these days aren't good enough, but when you 4-player Coop a game like Borderlands 2, it becomes a must play game of the year. Same goes for Halo, and GoW, and so many console shooters.

Most recently for me was Mass Effect 2.When I got it in 2009 I was sucked in to the hype following the first game and the good reviews the second one got. The game fell flat in the most important aspect: the combat system (just spam abilities, don't bother with positioning your players and giving instructions), level design was one of the worst i have ever seen, i felt like i was just being transported from one clearly linear level to the next fighting waves of enemies which was a task that was not enjoyable at all (mini game was pointless too) and every once in a while there was some day-time type drama going on the screen.

Cut them some slack.I'm not a "gamer" and many of us geeks are not "gamers" - Ars does not need to become yet another gamer site regurgitating the same things all the other dedicated gamer sites do.

What are you trying to say here? That it's a good thing to be ignorant about the games you write about because then your views will be more easily understood / accepted by the readership? That's really a crazy train of thought. Only when someone has a good grasp of a game will they be able to explain its downsides from both the serious and casual gamer's perspective, and their assessment will stand up to scrutiny.

The fact is most of the 'critiques' in this article are so short and lacking in substance that it's unclear whether the author even invested 20 hours in the game they're writing about, let alone giving the multiplayer component a reasonable try. That's simply uninformed and lazy journalism, and I'm tired of this "relax man, it's just his opinion" attitude that is trotted out to excuse it. When someone's 'opinion' is completely baseless and they don't even attempt to defend it then they deserve to be raked over the coals.

Dragon's Lair: Where on earth did you get the idea this is widely perceived as a great game? Heck, let's lower the bar- where on earth do you get the idea that there's even a significant minority of people who think it's a great game? It's well known, which has resulted in it showing up in popular culture frequently and being ported to many platforms, but I don't think you'll find very many people at all who would tell you with a straight face that it was actually a good game. This choice is just silly.

I was about to write almost the same thing. No-one I know who has ever played that game has said anything other than "nice cartoon, shame the game sucks". In fact I just looked it up on metacritic and the versions re-released in recently years have been almost universally panned.

As a kid I was sucked in to wasting a few bucks on it. But when faced with the choice of playing Galaga for half an hour or so for 20c or having $2 robbed from you in under 5 minutes, it didn't take long for the awe at the pretty pictures to wear off.

I'd have to say the Uncharted games... while I do enjoy a good story and I can usually put up with "stuff" to get through I could never get into these games... not for lack of trying mind you... they just never grabbed me...

It's like console gamers thought it was a revolution, but that's only because they weren't gaming on their PC's. At least with Halo, you KNEW that was the case. With Goldeneye, gamers everywhere were so ignorant.

I dunno, the game was pretty fun, it had a solid plotline, a good license, and solid enough level design. And the split screen multiplayer was quite nice, especially given the general dearth of good internet access at the time.

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Seriously, as a FPS geek in the 2000's, Halo was awesome for a single reason, I could get 3 other people in the room with me *in my family* to sit through a FPS with me COOP through a game. THAT is why Halo is important and not overrated. There were other shooters that did the things halo did sooner, and better, but none of them would be touched by people I knew. And, my memory is fuzzy for the time, but Halo felt like the first FPS to encourage coop and build around the idea of coop. This is important.

The big problem is that by the time Halo came out, the internet was common as dirt, so it wasn't nearly as special by then as, say, Goldeneye was in the mid 90s.

It is worth noting that Perfect Dark for the N64 had a coop mode years before Halo came out.

Minecraft and the Star Wars KOTR. I bought those piles of dog vomit and was so disappointed. The hype surrounding Star Wars was pretty big for the time and the game was so bad I quit playing it after about 10 minutes.